Tia Williams: Tia Williams is the New York Times bestselling author of Seven Days in June and a veteran beauty editor who has spent decades centering Black joy and modern glamour in her storytelling.

Farrah Rochon: Farrah Rochon is a USA Today bestselling author celebrated for her hit series The Boyfriend Projectand her ability to weave ambitious, relatable Black women into the heart of contemporary romance.

Author of Seven Days in June, Tia Williams and author Farrah Rochon traced the long, winding road behind Williams’s success—one paved with magazine deadlines, rejected manuscripts, stubborn conviction, and a refusal to flatten Black women into symbols of struggle. Williams spoke openly about building a career by straddling two worlds—glossy fashion media by day, fiction by night—until a toxic relationship, burnout, and a self-imposed exile to Spain cracked her open creatively and gave birth to her first novel. What followed was a sharp, often funny meditation on what it means to write romance without apology: insisting that Black women can exist in stories simply to love, desire, and dream; pushing back against an industry that doubted her credibility; and embracing risk, whether that meant indie publishing, watching her work transformed by Hollywood, or folding Harlem Renaissance history and Louisiana ancestry into contemporary love stories. Along the way, Williams dismantled myths about “Black excellence,” admitted the physical toll of writing with chronic migraines, and revealed how intuition—not permission—has guided every pivot in her career. The result was a reminder that literary success is rarely linear, never polite, and often born from refusing to make yourself smaller for anyone watching. 

This episode is part of the ongoing conversations hosted by Baldwin & Co., a Black-owned bookstore, café, and cultural institution based in New Orleans. Baldwin & Co. exists at the intersection of literature, ideas, and community—creating space for rigorous dialogue, storytelling, and intellectual exchange.

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